Colombian army rescues Ingrid Betancourt, American hostages and others

The american contractors were in captivity for over 5 years! Breaking news, can't find a link to an online story.

For those who don't know, Betancourt was a Colombian presidential candidate kidnapped years ago. A visible international story, specially in France, but I think most people here are not even aware of her.

McCain is in Colombia today, interestingly.

This should almost officially mark the end of the FARC in Colombia.

Yeah, most information right now on CNN. The site I read for these news with the latest is (noticias24.com) is completely swamped.

This is truly great news.

Will be interesting on the US political side how it is played. I wonder if the McCain camp will play up the fact that he was just there today supporting the Uribe government. I think McCain is on his way from Colombia to Mexico, but if he was in Colombia right now, wouldn't be surprised to see him make a statement right there which could play well for his campaign.

I wonder how Chavez will react to this, he was trying to get the credit for this.

If Crowe was involved, sadly, we'll never know about it. The US doesn't like to advertise the help they provide the Colombian military.

Latest here;
http://www.noticias24.com/actualidad/?p=15649

It was a Colombian military operation called Jaque (Check, like in checkmate).

15 people rescued, Betancourt, the 3 American contractors and various police and military hostages. There's still over 700 hostages out there, but these were the highest profile ones.

And ... she's home ...

Their main leader Tirofijo was revealed to have died of a heart attack around March. Their main communications leader, the guy who would deal with other governments and was the public face of the FARC was killed some months ago. Several senior people have been killed or captured and there have been a large number of desertions.

The problem for the FARC here is this is a complete blow to them, Ingrid Betancourt was their prized hostage (and the Americans to some extent). They gave the FARC leverage and allowed them to try to gain some attention from governments outside of Colombia to make Uribe, his government and the military look like bullies (ex: Chavez, and even France in some minor sense). Now they don't have this leverage.

They are still there, and they have not capture "Mono Jojoy" one of the main guys, but this is a big blow and loss to them. Also, expect the Colombian military to start attacking them with less reservation as they can't negotiate in the same way.

Notice that the way the capture them was partly because the Colombians infiltrated and fooled the FARC "secretariat" so they are pretty badly infiltrated as well.

This has not been a good year for FARC.

Yeah, basically they fooled them and even the hostages. Once inside the helicopter, they noticed the leader of the hostages bound and naked on the floor and the leader of the operation saying "We are the national army and you are all free".

Amazing that there were no casualties on either side.

Yeah, pretty amazing. Part of the disguise of the military guys in the heli was "Che Guevara" t-shirts. lol.

Their forces have gone from 20K a few years ago to 10K currently. Still a sizable number of people, and still making hundreds of millions in drug money. However, the group is destined to fracture. The mere fact that they were fooled this way shows a breakdown in their communications.

The Colombians left FARC on the ground alone, they said it was a gesture for encouraging them to give up, but I'm wondering if its not a sign that they "bought" collaboration from a few of them.

The two they captured are not so lucky, they released pictures of them today.





Reading a more detailed account of the operation, the guy in the first picture was very arrogant and the army took advantage of that and tried to stroke his pride. He has had previous screw ups with hostages, so they were relaying messages about how the new FARC leader trusted him and wanted him to be with him and his hostages. Betancourt also described him as a little despot, so the black eye seems very well deserved.

That was one of the first things I was thinking about when I heard this news. However, you do have to recognize that the current shape the Colombian military is in today is in large part to US monetary support, training and collaboration. Part of that "Plan Colombia" people keep hearing about, and with no shortage of critics.

For these operations the US always downplays its role, for many reasons, but in this one you can be sure that they used a lot of our satellite imagery to track the hostages. I read they've been close to them before, but just couldn't rescue them because obviously they could have been easily killed. They've had botched rescue operations before, and they just tried everything possible to avoid that in this case. I liked their backup plan which was to surround the area with 30 helicopters and soldiers and negotiate for the hostages release.

In the case of Bin Laden I do think it is genuinely a more difficult problem. It is far easier to impersonate an NGO or FARC member for Colombians, than for American soldiers to pass as Al-Qaeda members. Plus, Al-Qaeda and other terrorist group have a more cohesive ideology (in their mind) and purpose than FARC. FARC is supposed to be this Marxist "army of the people", and it really is more so than ever today, just a narco criminal organization with a very larger army.

Their members are not fanatical enough to commit suicide for their cause, and are more likely to be bribed. As far as I read it, we haven't had much luck offering money in exchange of some of these terrorists, their loyalists are well, more loyal apparently.

That doesn't excuse the fact that we apparently completely suck at infiltrating these groups. Maybe if we fostered more positive relations with the countries of the Middle East we would have much greater and effective cooperation to help us in this.